UPDATE: Markos has kindly extended the Friday night deadline to Sunday night, so you may continue to add yourself and others in the comments until Aug 10 at 11:59 pm PDT!
Hello, my cranky friends! I have important and good news today about images that were lost-ish in the Great Image Purge of 2019. (If this was you, you will know what I mean.) Please join me below the fold for more on this.
If you were not here back when Daily Kos moved from software Version 3 to Version 4 (2011) or from Version 4 to Version 5 (2015), you may well have no idea what this group is about or why we are cranky. I will let the group description give you the story in brief:
The Cranky Users group was founded in 2011 for DKos users who thought DK4 was scary or weird or hard to figure out. We made our way through DK4 and DK5, and now we're back! We're still gonna hold hands, help each other out, ask dumb questions, and laugh ourselves silly, this time as we navigate the jump to WordPress.
I’m bringing this series back as a way for all users to communicate about the site's migration to the WordPress platform, planned for early next year (and described by kos here, if you missed it). As you may also know, I’m honored to be part of the Community Advisory Panel that’s intended to help guide the migration to prioritize the features that are most important to the community. I’ll be posting to this group when I learn about something I think you should know, or there’s a question on the table that we need to hear your thoughts about.
📷 ➡️ So, here’s what I need to tell you today: in that “meet the panel” diary’s thread, siab asked about the images that were removed from the DK Image Library back in 2019 in the “Great Image Apocalypse”. This was an event in which all images added prior to December 2015 were removed from the library because of a legal threat. They didn’t cease to exist, but they could be restored only if their owner went to the Help Desk, identified the images, and asserted that they were owned and/or properly licensed by them. A lot of people didn’t act on that at the time but still mourn the loss of those images (or, as pointed out in the thread, did act but never actually got their requested images back because Reasons).
So RIGHT NOW THIS WEEK is the end of the window to recover these images and put them back in the Image Library. It was unclear that we still had any access to the old images, but kos checked and learned that we do, for the moment. And just for you, the process is SIMPLER now. IF YOU HAVE IMAGES you want to recover, TELL US IN A COMMENT IN THIS THREAD, or notify your favorite Community Advisory panelist or the Help Desk — I won’t be hurt! But,
WE MUST KNOW BY THIS FRIDAY, AUGUST 8, at 11:59 pm PDT
We need to add you to a list that’s being compiled, and that is the deadline we’ve been given, because there is not much time to get this rescue accomplished. You don’t have to say specifically which images — they will grab all that were uploaded by you, and I assume discuss with you anything that may be problematic.
ADDING: Because some folks asked, yes, it is okay to ask for the images of someone else who is no longer here but has old diaries you would like to see restored. We just need to know by the same deadline. However, please take a look at that person’s diaries and make sure there are actually missing images. A lot of people who used images in those days were still using an external photo host, and if they were, those images will not have been removed.
EDIT: I’m adding to this diary because I’m hearing some lack of clarity, here and elsewhere, on what this will and will not do. If you used an external host for images, such as Flickr or Photobucket, those images will have stayed in those places. Nothing was ever automatically imported into the Daily Kos image library. If you did not upload images there yourself, they are not there. This is ONLY about images that you uploaded to the Daily Kos image library before the end of 2015, which were removed in 2019 for legal reasons but not destroyed. Those are the images that can be recovered by joining the list.
If you are not sure if you have any such images, you can check:
Click the image library button in the toolbar (rightmost button, little mountain with sun/moon), and then click on the “My Images” button. Scroll down in your images, and when you reach the earliest ones, any removed images you have will show a gray box with “image removed” and a little crossed-out camera. If you click on one of them, you can still see whatever meta-data you entered, such as the file name and description, which you can use to decide if it’s anything worth getting back. And if you don’t see any of those, you don’t have any images that were hosted here but impounded in the 2019 action.
So, if you have old images you want back, please leave a comment below. AND ALSO, please mention this in any community spaces you visit here this week, so that as many other people as possible know about it. There will certainly be people who miss out because they don’t look here that often, but we’d like to have that happen as little as possible.
And if you are seeing this at NN this week, please especially mention it to other kossers, because they are chief among those who may have other things to do besides lurk around Daily Kos today.
I’ll be here as much as I can, today and this week, but I will DEFINITELY, no matter what else happens, go through this comment section on Friday night and make sure everyone who speaks up gets on the list.
In the past, Cranky User comment threads have served as open threads specifically for new-version-related questions or issues that people want answers on, and I hope they can work the same way here as migration issues crop up going forward. You can follow the group here, or the tag here, or you can just look for the cheerfully cranky dinosaur.
